The weather report showed a slight risk of
thunderstorms, and in the early hours of Aug. 10, Justin
Glisan, Iowa’s state climatologist, was feeling hopeful
about that. The land was dry and crying out for a good
soak. On a call with field agronomists that morning, he’d
exchanged wishes that the storm line making its way
across Nebraska would hold together over Iowa.
Despite coming off two of the state’s wettest years on
record and ideal planting conditions in the spring, the
summer months had been warm and windy, and by Au-
gust, severe drought had taken hold in West Central Iowa.
Glisan is attached to Iowa’s Department of Agriculture
and Land Stewardship, and on field visits, he had observed
the telltale signs that crops were experiencing physiologi-
cal stress: The corn had started to “fire,” its lower leaves
turning a brittle yellow as the plant shut down to conserve
water; the leaves of soybeans, meanwhile, were flipping
during the day to keep in what moisture they could.
All summer long, Glisan had watched storms approach
the region, and just fizzle out as they hit dry air. The state’s
farmland desperately needed rain.
Before he became state climatologist in 2018, Glisan
worked as a research atmospheric scientist at Iowa State
University, building regional climate models and study-
ing the fluid dynamics of the atmosphere. Every day,
he thought about the acts of Mother Nature in terms of
systems and parameters.But nothing—not that work, not his Ph.D. and two me-
teorology degrees, nor his storm-chasing experience in the
Midwest—prepared him for what so suddenly material-
ized over Iowa that day. He saw it coming from the deck of
his Des Moines home, a wall of dark-as-night clouds that
sent him scuttling to his basement. He was only halfway
there when a tree limb hit his house and ripped out a gas
main. The security alarm went off the moment he lost
power—precisely four seconds past 11 a.m.
Over the course of the next two hours, the “monster”
storm Glisan witnessed ripped across the state of Iowa
with increasing intensity and devastation, leaving in its
wake felled trees, downed power lines, overturned semis,
crumpled grain bins, flattened crops, and mangled homes
and businesses. By the time the storm petered out in Ohio,
at the end of its 14-hour, 770-mile run, it had caused some
$11 billion in damage, making it the most costly thunder-
storm in American history, according to data from the Na-
tional Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
At its peak, the wind gusts that day are thought to have
exceeded 140 miles per hour in Iowa, such an anomaly in
the middle of the country that NASA and Glisan are study-
ing photos of damage to make sense of the storm.
Even in a state full of weather-conscious farmers, the
event—which many Iowans still describe as an “inland
hurricane”—seemed completely alien and unworldly,
like nothing they’d seen before. In fact, it was a derechoTHE HEARTLANDHawkeye ElegyLAST SUMMER A MONSTER STORM OF UNPRECEDENTED VIOLENCE TORE ACROSS IOWA,
LEAVING BILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN DAMAGED FARMLAND IN ITS WAKE. IT WAS A BRUTAL
BLOW TO AN ECONOMY ALREADY REELING FROM AN UNFORGIVING PANDEMIC AND A STATE
DIVIDED BY POLITICS LIKE NEVER BEFORE. WHAT WILL IT TAKE TO REBUILD AND REUNITE?WHAT COMES NEXTNEXT
BY ERIKA FRYA grant from the NIHCM Foundation generously helped fund reporting for this story.